In 1562, he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, Austria and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. Augustus, Elector of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo’s work and commissioned a copy of his The Four Seasons which incorporates his own monarchic symbols.

When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years’ War, many of Arcimboldo’s paintings were taken from Rudolf II’s collection.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo did not leave written certificates on himself or his artwork. After the deaths of Arcimboldo and his patron—the emperor Rudolph II—the heritage of the artist was quickly forgotten, and many of his works were lost. They were not mentioned in the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Only in 1885 did the art critic K. Kasati publish the monograph “Giuseppe Arcimboldi, Milan Artist” in which the main attention was given to Arcimboldi’s role as a portraitist.

With the advent of surrealism its theorists paid attention to the formal work of Arcimboldo, and in the first half of the 20th century many articles were devoted to his heritage. Gustav Hocke [de] drew parallels between Arcimboldo, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst’s works. A volume monograph of B. Geyger and the book by F. Legrand and F. Xu were published in 1954.

Arcimboldo’s classification as mannerist also belongs to the 20th century. Its justification contains in Gustav Rehn Hok’s work The world as a Labyrinth, published in 1957. Arcimboldo was born in the late Renaissance, and his first works were done in a traditional Renaissance manner. In Hok’s opinion, during the Renaissance era the artist had to be first of all the talented handicraftsman who skillfully imitated the nature, as the idea of fine art was based on its studying. Mannerism differed from the Renaissance art in attraction to “not naturalistic abstraction”. It was a continuation of artistic innovation in the late Middle Ages—art embodying ideas. According to G. Hok, in consciousness there is concetto—the concept of a picture or a picture of the concept, an intellectual prototype. Arcimboldo, making a start from concetti, painted metaphorical and fantastic pictures, extremely typical for manneristic art. In On Ugliness, which was published under Umberto Eco’s edition, Arcimboldo also admitted belonging to manneristic tradition for which “…the preference for aspiration to strange, extravagant and shapeless over expressional fine” is peculiar.

In 1976, the Spanish sculptor Miguel Berrocal created the original bronze sculpture interlocking in 20 elements titled Opus 144 ARCIMBOLDO BIG as a homage to the Italian painter. This work was followed by the limited-edition sculpture in 1000 copies titled Opus 167 OMAGGIO AD ARCIMBOLDO (HOMAGE TO ARCIMBOLDO) of 1976–1979 consisting of 30 interlocking elements.

Since 1978 T. DaCosta Kaufmann was engaged in Arcimboldo’s heritage, and wrote of the artist defending his dissertation “Variations on an imperial subject”. His volume work, published in 2009, summed up the attitude of modern art critics towards Arcimboldo. An article published in 1980 by Roland Barthes was devoted to Arcimboldo’s works.

The 1992 novelette The Coming of Vertumnus by Ian Watson counterpoints the innate surrealism of the eponymous work against a drug-induced altered mental state.

Archimboldo’s relation with surrealism was emphasized at landmark exhibitions in New York (“Fantastic art, dada, surrealism”, 1937) and in Venice (“Arcimboldo’s Effect: Evolution of the person in painting from the XVI century”, Palazzo Grassi, 1987) where Arcimboldo’s allegories were presented. The largest encyclopedic exhibition of Arcimboldo’s heritage, where about 150 of his works were presented, including graphics, was held in Vienna in 2008. In spite of the fact that very few works of Arcimboldo are available in the art market, their auction cost is in the range of five to 10 million dollars. Experts note that it is very modest for an artist at such a level of popularity.